In the Capital Region, St. Peter’s Hospital in Albany, Ellis Hospital in Schenectady and Glens Falls Hospital were named to the Safest Hospital list, while Albany Medical Center was named to the Watch List for the third year in a row.

“We are raising the bar every year and working hard to improve so we are going to continue to see a decrease in our infection rates and complication rates,” said Albany Med’s Louis Filhour, senior vice president for clinical quality.

See below for the full list of New York hospitals that made the Safest Hospitals list and Watch List.

See below for a more detailed chart on the performance of Capital Region hospitals.

Leave a comment below on patient safety at your local hospital.

The hospital report card is in danger of elimination. The state has wiped out funding ($250,000/year) for the NHQC, a nonprofit group that has done ground-breaking work in measuring and publishing individual hospital performance.

NHQC is an independent organization based in Western New York that pioneered methods to use federally-endorsed hospital quality indicators to measure hospital performance. Twelve other states have copied the group’s work. NHQC operates on a shoe-string budget of $500,000 a year and does not accept money from hospitals or industry groups that it evaluates.

Hearst Newspaper collaborated with NHQC in 2009 to create detailed safety analysis on hospitals in New York, Texas, Connecticut and Massachusetts as part of the “Dead by Mistake” series on medical errors. It was the first time that hospital-specific patient safety data was published in those other states.

Note: Patients should not make decisions about where to get treatment based solely on this analysis, but could use it to ask informed questions. It is important to examine a hospital’s results for specific procedures and use other resources to assess quality, as hospitals on the Watch List may have performed well on some individual measures. The hospitals on the Watch List are not necessarily bad hospitals, but the results show they could do better in some areas. Despite the known limitations of the data, it is recognized as the best available tool to evaluate hospital safety on a large scale.

The safety analysis was based on: mortality rates for 14 procedures; patient safety rates for 11 conditions including post-operative sepsis and post-operative blood clots; the number of foreign bodies retained during surgery and transfusions of the wrong blood type; whether hospitals performed a minimum number of cases to claim competency on six complex surgeries; and hospital participation in two national safety programs.

NY Capital Region Hospitals

Below is a look at how Capital Region hospital performed on the New York Hospital Report Card published by the Niagara Health Quality Coalition at myhealthfinder.com. The first section looks at mortality rates and the second section looks at how well hospitals avoided preventable medical conditions. Average means that hospitals performed at the state average, “better” means they were better than the state average and “worse” means they were worse than the state average. The report card is based on 2009 data that hospitals provided to the state.

One Response

Ellis Hospital is the worst hospital I have ever experienced (having moved to the area from an urban center it is shocking). A huge shame is this community has no other options. If the management had a clue about appropriate medical care in 2012 it might be another story … but for now Ellis bumbles along offering the poorest environment and care imaginable … seemingly unaware of the damage created along the way.

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Cathleen Crowley

Claire Hughes covers health care in the Capital Region for the Times Union